Heavy Sea in Étretat

In December 1868 Monet wrote from Étretat to his friend the painter Frédéric Bazille that he spent his days outdoors on the shingle whenever the weather turned rough or the fishing boats went out. This canvas comes from that winter. The sea fills most of it, rows of breaking waves stacked one behind another, with the cliff called the Falaise d'Aval on the left and one small boat far out on the horizon. Down on the beach a knot of fishermen and women stand close together, watching the water.

It is a large picture for a study of weather, more than a metre wide, and the Musée d'Orsay dates it only to around 1868 or 1869. In 1906 the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton gave it to the French state, in the same gift as Manet's Luncheon on the Grass.